The orange lily protected an old secret.
To the unsuspecting eye there may have been nothing significant about the tattoo which stretched across her thigh. But under the glow of the lights, with her fingers pointing out the faint bumps, the old cuts were unmistakable.
“How do you feel about your scars now?” I ask, gently brushing my own fingers across the healed wound site.
“These ones I’m ok with, because I’ve got my lovely tattoo,” she says, turning so I can see the scars the flower hadn’t managed to cover. “But I have more on my arms and people can see them, but they don’t say anything. And I wonder about the future, what I’ll have to tell my kids someday.”
“It’s beautiful. Why a lily?”
“Well, I love lilies,” she says, rubbing the site, “but orange is the color for self-harm awareness, and I wanted to do something with that.”
“Was the tattoo to hide or protect?”
“I think both. But mostly to protect. I got it when I decided once and for all I wasn’t going to cut anymore. And I loved the tattoo so much, I knew I wasn’t going to damage it.”
She had been self-harm free for three months, and already her face glowed with a light and hope she had once thought impossible. As our interview came to a close, she beamed at me and the others in the room who had shared their stories.
"I'm so... I'm so PROUD of us!"